getting best tone out of a shite guitar

[damien6]

Can you adjust your pickups at all? There should be a couple of screws next to them. Turning them one way will lower the pickup and vice versa. Bringing the pickups closer to your strings may help.

[chaibuka]

Make sure to put nut lube on the nut. That should help keep the tuning stable. With your amp modeler it helps to have proper input level. I think what might work well is to leave gtr rig input at 0db set your gtr volume to full amount and while strumming hard chords move your preamp gain up until the input meter on gtr rig is high but not red. When you adjust pickups select bridge or neck and set your gtr volume about half and adjust corresponding pickup. As you move the pickup closer to the string and pick the high or low it should sound tight and punchy but if it gets to close it will become to distorted. What I did is fret the string around 17th or 19th and move the pickup at both high and low e string so that the pickup is close but not touching the strings the experiment a full screw turn or more to a good clear sound. Before adjusting the pickups pick a good gtr rig preset that sounds close to being good. Some presets are just not that easy to deal with. I would think it might be easer to make adjustments with a clean amp setting.

Hope some of this helps

[nebulae]

^ +1 - GR3 used to sound like CRAP until I figured out the input levels on each of my guitars and bass.

[ghostly]

some great stuff here!

[elxicano]

Hey, wasn't it the guy from White Stripes (Jack White) that says he loves a shite guitar? Saw some movie preview recently about him, Jimmy Page and Dave "The Edge" Evans where Jack White mentioned that. Sort of cool, considering the gear lust for Fenders and Gibsons... although I would love Gibson's Robot Guitar...

Sorry. Completely off topic.

[slirak]

Can you adjust your pickups at all? There should be a couple of screws next to them. Turning them one way will lower the pickup and vice versa. Bringing the pickups closer to your strings may help.

I'd say this and getting heavier strings are the two major tips if you're not ready to invest in new pickups and/or new hardware. Just be aware that raising the pickups too much might affect the intonation. Yeah, really! The magnets are actually strong enough to pull the strings and affect intonation if they're too close.

Also, with a bad guitar, you might have to raise the strings at the bridge more than you would with a good guitar (to avoid string buzz).

Another thing is if your Strat has a whammy bar. Then adjusting it so that the metal block that your strings run through is as tight as possible against the wood of the body (perhaps even so tight that you can't use the whammy) will give you noticeably better sustain.

If you have a hum problem and a five way pickup switch, use the second position (the one that gives you the bridge and middle pickups). If you feel this gives you a too 'hollow' sound, try adjusting the mid pickup to be as low as possible. This way it wont pickup the strings much, but will still reduce hum. If you have a three way switch you can usually still find an in-between position where both the bridge and mid pickup are active.

[slirak]

Oh, and also, if you find it difficult to get the guitar correctly intoned using the screws at the bridge, there are two things to consider: is the neck straight and is the nut straight. If not, you will probably not be able to intone the guitar and may also have a problem with buzzing strings. If the neck or the nut isn't straight, I'd suggest you consult a guitar techie. You can fix it yourself, but if you haven't done it before, you can cause considerable damage...

[slirak]

And yeah, ++++++1 to make sure you're using a Hi-Z input if you're going straight into a sound card!

[slirak]

^ +1 - GR3 used to sound like CRAP until I figured out the input levels on each of my guitars and bass.

Correctemundo.

But that's a given for any external sound source, right?

[nebulae]

^ +1 - GR3 used to sound like CRAP until I figured out the input levels on each of my guitars and bass.

Correctemundo.

But that's a given for any external sound source, right?

Yes and no...depends. Some sounds are better overdriven, while others not. The thing with GR3 is the because the software emulates what happens to signals as they saturate, it's more critical to make sure the input is as clean and unsaturated as possible, and let the software do the rest.

[slirak]

^ +1 - GR3 used to sound like CRAP until I figured out the input levels on each of my guitars and bass.

Correctemundo.

But that's a given for any external sound source, right?

Yes and no...depends. Some sounds are better overdriven, while others not. The thing with GR3 is the because the software emulates what happens to signals as they saturate, it's more critical to make sure the input is as clean and unsaturated as possible, and let the software do the rest.

Yeah, you're right. It's the same with Amplitube.

[Angstrom]

you could try finding a smallish local guitar store and ask if they have some kind of 'bits' box. Often they have parts which have been cast off repair jobs and you will be able to have these parts for next to nothing. This has been my experience anyway. Often stock bridges are discarded when the store fits a customers half-decent guitar with a megabucks bridge, in this case the stock bridge is often decent enough quality to be desirable on a plank (!)
If you can get hold of a decent simple bridge, and perhaps a simple factory pickup of any kind; then that may help quite a bit.

The hum sounds like it's most probably the shielding, or possibly some crappy components /soldering.
This sort of thing is relatively cheap to do yourself, sort out the shielding and replace the crappy components too. It can be a bit time consuming, but I consider this sort of tweaking a fun hobby. Despite being a perpetual novice I find basic guitar electronics is quite self explanatory, plus - you can do it without much fear or cost on a plank (where it doesn't really matter).

http://www.guitarnuts.com/wiring/menu.php
http://alexplorer.net/guitar/mods.html

[porfiry]

The main issues with cheap guitars is always cheap pick ups and shoddy connections generating noise and hum.

That's a feature, not a bug.

I always rather preferred cheap guitars and amps that had at least one thing wrong with them. The piece-of-shit silverface Pro Reverb I still have has about a dozen issues. Nothing a really hard whack on top won't fix. Gotta jostle those fucking tubes back into place. You really haven't lived until you've played a few shows banging on a sweet old bastard like that.

[dysanfel]

I haven't read this whole thread so if this has been said, sorry.

Take the guitar to your local luthier and have it set up professionally. Spend the $35+ and get this done right. If you want to get a better sound perhaps you should think about different pickups. If you want a heavier sound get humbuckers, and if your looking for a thinner cleaner sound get some single coils.

Most any guitar can get a decent sound if its set up correctly and has good pickups.

[bosonHavoc]

why not use the acoustic?

just because its acoustic doesn't mean you can not add what ever effects you want